Mark Billingham - Death Message

‘Don’t use any of those hip-hop ones,’ Kitson said. ‘People will think you’re having a mid-life crisis.’

Thorne looked up. He hadn’t heard her come in.

‘You can download them now, you know,’ she said. ‘You could get some Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash.’

‘“Ringtone of Fire”,’ Thorne suggested. He watched as his fellow DI ordered her desk and scribbled something on a piece of paper. When she said his new phone looked flash, he passed it across to her and explained the hassle he’d gone through buying it, while she scrolled through some of its features. Though Kitson had heard the jungle-drum version of the photo-on-the-phone story, Thorne talked her through the true sequence of events: the message in the early hours; the picture of a dead man.

‘It’s the same as when people show you their holiday snaps,’ Kitson said.

‘Like a souvenir, you mean?’

‘Only up to a point. They’re really saying: “Look how well off and wonderful we are. Look at where we’ve been.”’

‘You think he’s bragging?’ Thorne said. He blinked, saw the black inside the open mouth, the wet mess behind the ear. Spoke as much to himself as to Kitson: ‘“Look what I’ve done”…’

She nodded, handing back the phone. ‘I still don’t see why you needed to get this. Why didn’t they just send the SIM card to the lab?’

‘Don’t ask me.’ Thorne did not want to explain that he hadn’t known how to swap over his contact numbers. Or the fact that he was rather enjoying his tasty new phone.

‘You could have got a prepay SIM card and put it in your old handset.’

Thorne shrugged, stared down at the phone. ‘Yeah, well, I’ll know next time.’

‘Anything from the lab yet?’

‘Nothing useful,’ Thorne said. ‘Tell me about this knife.’

It was, according to Kitson, a bog-standard, six-inch kitchen knife, fished from a litter bin in a park opposite the pub where Deniz Sedat had been stabbed to death. The council street-cleaner who’d found it, having seen enough episodes of CSI to know about such things, had put his hand inside a plastic bag before picking it up and carrying it carefully along to Finsbury Park police station.

Thorne told Kitson he didn’t watch a lot of cop shows. She said he wasn’t missing much, but at least they were good for something. He asked her if she thought they’d found the murder weapon.

‘It looked like there was blood smeared on the blade.’

‘Brigstocke told me there was all sorts of shit on it,’ Thorne said. ‘You sure it wasn’t chilli sauce?’

‘Size of the blade fits with the fatal stab wound, according to Hendricks.’

‘What does he know? Useless Mancunian twat…’

Kitson grinned.

Phil Hendricks was the pathologist attached to Team 3 at the Area West Murder Squad. He was also Tom Thorne’s closest friend, or the closest thing to it.

‘I’d be surprised if S &O are quite as excited as they were,’ Thorne said. ‘Does the average East European hitman, or whoever they’ve got pegged for this, usually chuck his weapon in the nearest litter bin?’

Kitson still had a pen in her hand, but from where Thorne was sitting, it looked like she was doodling. ‘Well, they don’t normally use knives, so fuck knows.’

‘Knives, guns… dead is dead.’

‘Right, and it was certainly quick,’ Kitson said. ‘Professional, you know? How long was Sedat out of his girlfriend’s sight? One minute, two?’

Harika Kemal had announced that she’d needed to visit the ladies’ as the two of them were leaving the Queen’s Arms. Sedat had reached for his cigarettes and said he’d wait for her in the car park. Harika told the police afterwards that she’d gone outside a couple of minutes later and found Sedat dying on the floor. Kitson had seen the horror in the girl’s eyes as she’d made her statement; could only imagine her feelings at seeing her boyfriend slumped against the front wheel of a car, leaking blood into the dirt and gasping for air, like a fish in an angler’s fist.

‘Yeah, certainly quick,’ Thorne said. ‘Dispassionate.’

Kitson jabbed the air with her ballpoint. ‘Nice and clean. Straight through the heart.’ She leaned back in her chair, dropped the pen on the desk and let out a long breath. ‘Fuck, I could murder a cigarette.’

‘Since when?’ Thorne had given up years before, but still got pangs every now and then. Holland had recently started smoking, much to his girlfriend’s disgust. Maybe nicotine-stained was becoming the new black.

‘Just a couple in the evening, you know? With a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, whatever.’

It sounded good. Thorne looked at the clock. ‘Let’s piss off, shall we?’

They talked as they gathered up their things, Kitson rooting in her bag for car keys, Thorne shoving papers into a tatty brown briefcase he’d found in the bottom of his father’s wardrobe.

Kitson turned off the lights. ‘Well, whether hitmen use knives or throw them into bins afterwards, they don’t tend to leave a lot of fingerprints, so we’ll know soon enough…’

The Homicide offices were on the third floor of Becke House. Thorne and Kitson gave the lift a minute, then decided to walk. The communal areas had recently undergone a modest upgrade, which had included carpeting the stairs. The smell, which lingered three weeks on, reminded Thorne of moving house, sometime when he was a kid: cardboard boxes, and his dad bringing home takeaways.

It also made him feel a little apprehensive.

‘What have you got on tonight, then?’

He wondered if it was carpet beneath the head of the dead man in the picture. It had been impossible to tell. Maybe when they enhanced the photo…

‘Tom?’

Thorne turned, stared until Kitson repeated her question. ‘Just stopping in,’ he said, after a moment. ‘You?’

‘The usual madness,’ Kitson said, sounding a little envious of Thorne’s empty schedule. ‘Actually, even madder than that. My eldest has GCSEs coming up, so things are a bit tense.’

‘I bet.’ They turned on to the final flight. Kitson rarely spoke about life at home and Thorne felt vaguely honoured.

‘It’s hard for him,’ Kitson said. ‘You know? It’s a lot to cope with at that age. They don’t know how to handle the pressure.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Fifteen.’

Thorne grimaced. ‘I’m three times that, near enough.’ He leaned his shoulder against the door. The cold slapped him in the face as he stepped out into the car park. ‘I wish some bugger would tell me how to handle it.’

At the flat, Thorne had grated cheese into a bowl of tomato soup and stared at his new phone, willing it to ring. Finally, it had, twice in quick succession. Now Thorne was sitting in his living room, watching the two callers drink his lager and cheerfully take the piss out of him.

It was a continuation of a discussion that had been going on for the last week, since Halloween, when Thorne had voiced his considerable antipathy towards the practice of ‘trick or treating’.

‘It’s a paedophile’s dream,’ he said now. ‘An endless parade of kids knocking on the door.’

Phil Hendricks took a slurp of Sainsbury’s own-brand lager. ‘That’s bollocks. You’re just tight, and you can’t be arsed to get any sweeties in.’

‘It’s a stupid bloody Americanism. We never used to do it…’

‘You’re such a miserable git,’ Louise said.

‘Most of them don’t even make any effort. They don’t dress up or anything.’

‘They’re kids …’

‘It’s just an excuse for ASBO fodder to chuck fireworks and stick dog-shit through old people’s letterboxes.’

‘I think Louise is right,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re tight and miserable.’